1. Identify and prioritize the social channels your customers use
2. Define clear goals and ways to measure your progress
3. Allocate enough resources to each strategy
4. Always get executive-level buy in to support your objectives
5. Start small with a limited set of channels, and expand as you mature

The following graphic from “Social Media in the Contact Center” by Mariano Tan shows you the channels organizations use from a recent TSIA survey. The most popular, in descending order, are online communities, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Their relative popularity is a function of how easy they are to implement and measure ROI.

Social media support has become mainstream, with over 80% adoption in 2011, up from 40% in 2007.

The channels you implement will depend on your objectives, resources, and nature of your customers. Remember to start small and grow one step at a time, just like the leaders mentioned above.

Step 2: Understand Your Social Customer

Know your customers. This knowledge is necessary to build lasting and valuable relationships. It is key to any successful sales, marketing, or customer service effort. It’s no coincidence the best customer care organizations have the best understanding of their customers.

But the social customer is a different beast than your traditional customer. How are they different?

In addition to 3rd party research, consider creating a focus group to get a direct understanding of your specific customers. You should also build a feedback system that profiles and aggregates statistics about your customers and their interactions from across your channels. Finally, solicit feedback from your contact center agents who are interacting with your customers on a daily basis.

Once you have a clear understanding of your social customers across each channel, share them across your entire support organization.

Here are four relevant pages pulled from Nielsen’s report that profile the social customer:

1. Social Customer Demographics

2. Social Customer Characteristics

3. Social Customers by Country

4. Social Customers by Device

Step 3: Social Media Goals and Metrics

Organizations are at varying stages of maturity with regards to their social contact center. A challenge faced by all companies is how to best measure their efforts using relevant business metrics.

What are your goals? Why are you using social media? What impact are you trying to achieve for your company and your customers?

You will need a set of social key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress. While the indicators you use may vary, they should all be:

1. Measured Accurately
2. Relevant
3. Actionable

Start with a limited set of metrics. Avoid investing all your time and resources crunching numbers. What’s key is making sense of these numbers and using them to identify specific steps to take to accelerate your progress.

Do not try to measure and track all of these metrics. Choose a subset that measures and represents your goals most accurately.

Step 4. People, Processes, Technology

Your social contact center is only as good as the people, processes, and technologies you put in place. A weak link in any one of these areas will impact your overall effectiveness. It is arguably the hardest part to get right and is what separates social support leaders from the laggards.

People
People are your most valuable asset. You must empower them with the knowledge of your customers, how they should interact with them, and how you will measure their performance.

Senior Executives: Getting buy-in and sponsorship from senior executives is essential to any social care strategy. Get their support by forecasting the impact your strategy will have on the business and supply them with ongoing metrics to quantify your progress.

Managers: Managers need an understanding of your strategic goals and how to achieve them. They need to understand what they are being measured on, how they should measure their support staff, and what processes to follow. A little wiggle room to experiment will offer them the flexibility to determine what works best.

Support Staff: Arguably the most important touchpoint because they’re the front-line agents who interact with your customers. They should be trained in social media norms, and how those channels are different from traditional support channels. Agents should be provided with an easy to follow guide on how your customers use social channels and how to best service them. Appreciation goes a long way, as do incentives. A happy agent typically delivers a better experience than one who hates their job. It is your responsibility to make sure they fall into the first bucket.

Processes

The processes you put in place could make or break your social contact center strategy. Clearly define how to communicate with customers, resolve issues, how to measure performance, and how to implement strategic recommendations.

Technology

Technology helps you communicate with your customers and measure your performance. It will enable you to:

The rolled up 360 view of your customers is often the hardest point to achieve. Getting it right means you have solid insight across all your touch-points. Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Investing time and resources in this step will pay off.

Omar Zaibak is the Marketing Manager for VoiceTrust and manages The VoiceTrust Blog. VoiceTrust prevents fraud and identity theft in the call center and delivers a better customer experience with voice biometrics.

[Mar 23-24, 2017, Barcelona] An internationally recognized program with proven track record of success - being run for 56 times in 19 cities and has trained up CX professionals from 67 countries on six continents. The program is developed based on the Branded CEM Method which provides a strategic framework, statistically proven applications and an emotion curve tool to help enterprises to deliver differentiated experience in driving C-SAT, retention and NPS without spending extra resource.

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